Point your finger somewhere else

On my way to the grocery store yesterday I heard an interview on NPR with Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu on the future of the city of New Orleans. One interesting thing he mentioned was that representatives of the city have been testifying in front of Congress for nearly 40 years in an attempt to get them to fund a better levee system and to pay more attention to the coastal erosion that is so much a part of why Katrina did such massive damage. Congress has been turning a deaf ear, according to Landrieu, for the bulk of that time. I mention this only because there is a lot of talk whizzing around the blogsphere about how negligent the Bush administration has been in responding to this disaster. And negligent they have been, so negligent, in fact, that I’m forced to wonder if the treatment of the people in New Orleans was deliberate.

Louisiana was, on balance, a red state; its electoral votes went to Bush. The map provided by the US Census Bureau says that the city of New Orleans is located Orleans parish, which voted for Kerry by a margin of 3.5 to 1. So maybe there is some credence to the idea that stalling on disaster aid is payback. After all, Jeb did deliver Florida for his brother, only by 381,147 votes, but in a race where even one vote is enough, that’s a pretty big margin.

Maybe the lack of response, both to pleas for more money for the levees and to the actual disaster, has more to with the fact that Louisiana is, by and large, a poor state, and Orleans parish is poor for Louisiana. In 2000, the median household income in Louisiana was $32,566; in Orleans parish it was $27,133. Compared to the national media income of $41,994, they’re not working with too much. Of course, given that the poverty threshold in 1999 was $8,501 for a single person under the age of 65, what we consider to be above subsistence level isn’t really all that realistic. Which brings us around to the real noodle of the problem: is FEMA’s demonstrated incompetence about race or is it about class?

It’s hard to tell for the simple reason that race and class are, in America, deeply intertwined. Of the total number of people in the Census Bureau’s “poverty universe,” 24.9% answered single-race “Black or African American alone” as compared to the combined 17.2% who answered “White alone” or “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino” nation wide. My head is already swimming from the statistics so let’s just make the assumption that if you’re brown in America there’s a really good chance your income isn’t as high as your white neighbors, or more likely, as the white people who live across town from you. It’s nearly inevitable, then, that race has played a factor but, as in all racial debates in this country, we’ve gone from 0 to 165 mph in under 10 seconds.

Today the New York Times ran an article (pdf 17kb) in which Oprah Winfrey called for an apology from the entire nation to the people of New Orleans:

“I was sitting at home feeling frustrated and useless, like so many other people, so I came down to personally assess how I could best be of service,” Ms. Winfrey said yesterday in a statement relayed by a spokeswoman.

What she found, she said, surprised her: “Nothing I saw on television prepared me for what I experienced on the ground,” she said on the show. While she stopped short of overt criticism of the relief efforts, she said later: “This makes me so mad. This should not have happened.” And after hearing descriptions of people dying unattended in the streets, she said, “I think we all – this country owes these people an apology.”

Now, perhaps I’m oversensitive, living as I do in a city where race is the immediate excuse for every little thing, but this sure sounds to me like a black celebrity saying that white America needs to apologize. I’ve had two separate people tell me they’ve seen photos or heard commentary over news footage where black people taking goods from stores were characterized as “looting” and white people taking goods from stores were characterized as “finding supplies.” Given that I haven’t seen this myself, I can’t say that it’s true (snopes.com anyone?) but I do know that the one thing that any dissection of the massive misfeasance and malfeasance that has been the response to this disaster needs is precision.

Maybe the entire executive branch of the Fed needs to apologize to these people. After all, FEMA is controlled by the arm of the hydra headed by monkeyboy Bush. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to take personal responsibility for, or even brook the efforts of someone trying to make me feel responsible for, something that was in no way, shape, or form under my control simply because of the color of my skin.

I’m sorry the government I did not choose when I voted failed these people. My heart aches for their losses; for the atrocities perpetrated on the helpless, the sick, and the confused; for the lives destroyed. I will do everything I can to help, but just treating the symptoms – giving people new houses and new things – isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference if we don’t look at why so many are kept so poor by systemic failures of education, opportunity, and self-motivation. The thing we all need to realize, though is that the problem is not just the system, is also the people on both sides of the system: To live your life expecting something because of any criterion which is not directly under your control is as wrong as denying someone a chance based on any such a criterion.

Resources:

Louisiana QuickLinks (Census 2000 data sets for Louisiana)

Poverty 1999 (pdf document)